New Delhi Times - Gaurav Bhatnagar reporting from New Delhi, India

Hotmail pissed me off immensely today. For whatever reasons, my hotmail account was inaccessible for several hours today. I have been using hotmail for my official communications of late (a big mistake as I now realize). We have been working across three continents on a project - so being able to communicate effectively is critical.

So while I was twiddling thumbs and hitting the refresh button waiting for hotmail to come back, I thought about what all is wrong with hotmail. A LOT, in my opinion. For example:

1. No pop access.

2. Awfully slow and painful access via Outlook

3. 250MB space for only people who sign up in North America. What's up with that?

4. Really slow and inefficient search. There is no advanced search feature. You just get one search box. MSN is supposed to be building a kick-ass search engine. How about using it in hotmail?

5. No auto-complete in TO: field while composing email. Both Yahoo and Gmail have it and it makes life much easier when you have 100s of contacts in your address book.

6. A very very annoying caching issue. This has been introduced recently. Clicking "Inbox" just brings up the locally cached copy of the inbox. So you end up having to hit refresh 5 times before the real inbox shows up. Guys, if it ain't broke, don't fix it!

7. Overuse of Javascript. Many links are actually call javascrip functions on clicking. This means, you can't do a right-click -> open in new window on these links. That means, I cant compose a mail in a seperate window while reading my mail in the other window.

8. Poor usability and navigation. Popup blockers block the "upload attachment" window. The contacts list on the compose window is organised in some mysterious way. Some of my contacts never show up there for whatever reason. When the compose mail page loads, it suddenly takes focus away from the address field to insert the signature in the body field.

I could go on and on. If somebody from MSFT is reading, then please forward this to the hotmail team. I dont want to stop using hotmail and I know Microsoft is capable of doing a much better job of it.